


The origin story of Yuuko Ichihara

by LLitchi



Category: xxxHoLic
Genre: Ancient History, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 11:06:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17243126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LLitchi/pseuds/LLitchi
Summary: It was in Palmyra that I first began to collect objects of significance.





	The origin story of Yuuko Ichihara

It was in Palmyra that I first began to collect objects of significance. Of course, I was in Palmyra in the first place because I could no longer tolerate Kanto—in the summer heat it melted, and I would have rather burned, turned into dust. Clow once said I so loved the dry whims of the desert because it is where wooden doors can last longer than handsome boys made in bronze, and I said that perverts like him must have preferred Greece.

But the city was different since I last saw it. Larg had never been. He refused to come out of the satchel I carried until I dumped it out and he fell into the fountain. It woke him up, even more so when a curious man came over and offered to buy my exotic pet, and I threatened to let Larg get onto the stage with gladiators.

I neglected to tell him that such festivities were already long gone, or so my friend told me. Baal Shamin and I kept periodically in touch. He liked to appear in my dream and complain bitterly of the Christian god, whose arrival had spelled the end of the games. He had demanded that I visited him in person, in the city of his temple, for he had something he could not tell me in my dreams.

His urgency was made more apparent to me now. The Christian god was everywhere, and Larg and I both gawked at his image: on the friezes, on the walls, the altars, anywhere that was not already destroyed by the little Roman king. The fountain was still there, but Bel’s temple had been pillaged, and there were not as many people as I remembered. The last time I stayed at Palmyra so many years ago with Clow, we took refuge in Baal Shamin’s home, recovering after a bad experiment, and I had consumed all of the wine of our host and passed out behind the shrine while Clow paced and fretted like a child. I was too reckless, he told me, angry and a little scared, all his pride forgotten like a bad taste. The next morning we pretended as if Clow didn’t rip his heart out and offer it to me; instead we ventured into the city, walked under the great colonnade, visited the market. I thought I could still hear the murmurs of the market now, with Clow’s low rumble in my ears, excited over the jewelry from Alexandria and mellowed at the edges with the heat.

By the end of the day Larg and I had made it to Baal Shamin’s home. I was glad to see it standing though not surprised, because even robbed of their pride the Palmyrene people still had their vanity. At the steps Baal greeted us solemnly, everything about him seeming sadder and older, everything but his eyes, even though it was not a hundred years ago when Clow and I called thunder to earth like a game and had to ask the god of the sky for help. I thought that Baal visibly decided not to ask about Clow, as though accepting that his friends were all dying before he did.

In truth Clow had not died—I had merely banished him after we realized what had been done, and I could not stand to see his guilty face, which made all of us guilty by association.

“Clow couldn’t be here,” I said vaguely by way of apology, though indeed it turned out Clow was not needed.

Baal had asked me straightforwardly and hopelessly to keep him alive. We were looking out at his courtyard, both thinking of the time when it was swarmed with worshippers, when he sat on his shrine flanked by Aglibol and Malakbel, with brilliant eyes and flowing hair. Now the armor in which Baal swept around his home seemed like his funerary attire. He would be buried with it.

“The Christians are taking your home,” I guessed.

“A god without his temple.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Neither Clow nor I can go against the laws of this world.” Larg cooed in pain on my shoulder.

He shrugged. We had a feast, then, an odd assortment of wines and foods that the Palmyrene thought fit for the gods, that they could still bear to give to the spirits in this declining city that was almost a village. There was deep red wine and bits of bread, which Larg cheerfully dug into, determined to please our host. I draped my legs on one side of the table and commandeered the amphora.

I kept wondering about this request Baal made of me. Certainly it could not be granted, but at the same time it could not be a coincidence that we were able to meet. The law of the natural world, that’s one law. Hitsuzen, that’s another law. Both could not be violated. I said to him, “There is one way, if you are willing to do it.”

Baal considered me slowly. In his weakness and his nearness to death, I had forgotten that he was still a god. He shook his head and proffered a hand, asking for my arm, which I gave to him. I was wearing a lushly violet silk dress then, rare in the cities of the Eastern Empire, and Baal held my arm on one hand and the trail of my sleeve on the other. He said, “I thought after that foolishness with the weather, that you would not survive.”

I took my arm back. “I was mortal when we last met.”

“So that’s it,” he sighed deeply. I wondered if he pitied or envied my immortality. The last time we met in my dream, he did not hesitate to talk of his impotence; his worshippers begged him for harvest, which the soil would never give and which Palmyra never had. They begged him for trade, which was rerouted by that little Roman king. What could the god of the sky give them? So many of their wishes went unanswered that they turned to a different religion, one that told them the truth, told them they were pitiful and would remain so as long as they lived on this earth. This new god didn’t sit on a throne and he didn’t favor the fortunate. He didn’t promise his flock anything he could not give. I feared that if I met him, we too could become friends.

“Did you see that I was cursed?” I asked. “I can no longer give or take without equal exchange, and I cannot help you in return for nothing.”

Baal reclaimed the amphora and emptied it of wine. “But you can grant my wish?”

I had not thought of it that way. Sometimes those who knew of my power came to me for help, which I always hated to give because seldom could they pay the price. But calling it a “wish,” naming it, this itself had power. Wishes were precious, delicate, hopeful things. They were also desperate, terrible, blasphemous things. I had despaired of warning people who wanted more than they could give, so perhaps by naming it—

“Yes,” I decided. How are wishes different from desires? Wishes are _made_. Wishes are asked upon another being, another force, and wishes must be verbalized because wishes, like prayers, are helpless. “I can help you live as long as I live.”

Baal Shamin, god of the sky, gripped the hilt of his sword and asked, “How long would that be?”

“You and I will outlive this Roman king and all Roman kings.” I said. “We will outlive the dynasty after that and the dynasty after that. We will outlive this city and these people, who have abandoned you, and who will place your statue in the forum next to other forgotten gods, where in a few decades you will burn with the Greek pantheon.”

Baal Shamin asked, inevitably, “What is your price?”

I wondered then if I seemed to them a mere monkey’s paw. Clow told me once that I had the same sense of humor as that detestable object. Unlike the monkey’s paw, I found alternative payments other than the crudest and the cruelest, but I supposed our common sense of humor came from knowing the precise price that should the extracted in exchange for a wish—no, in exchange for anything given; care, labor, eyes and blood. In truth the monkey’s paw and I, because we followed the laws of this world, leveraged them and exploited them, we were more powerful than Clow would ever be.

 “You will need to give me your statue,” I said to Baal Shamin now. “I will pray to you for as long as I remember you, but you will be bound to me. You will answer to my call and you will die when I die. You will have offerings of fruits and wine but you will not have your worshippers or your homeland. Do you agree to these terms?”

“You said my statue will burn down in the forum?”

I nodded. It would. I saw it happen.

“Then I accept,” he said. I fell down to my knees and prayed to him, my arms held out in Orans, praying that I would not forget my god. After that we brought out all the food in the temple, ate fermented fish and poured olive oil over everything and Larg sang of places we had been, would be, would never return to find. For the god of the sky this would still be a death of sorts, but now there would be a rebirth, Baal Shamin into a lesser god, until the point when he could be given back to his people, when they could find his image and worship him once more, flanked by Aglibol and Malakbel, with brilliant eyes and flowing hair.

**Author's Note:**

> comments are love


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